I have a few subjects nailed down for next year for first grade, but I am struggling with language arts. What are your recommendations ? I've seen a few that used real literature and thought that sounded like a great idea, but I'm not locked into anything, just exploring my options. I'm just looking for something to keep him on grade level or above.

Elizabeth86 wrote:I have a few subjects nailed down for next year for first grade, but I am struggling with language arts. What are your recommendations ? I've seen a few that used real literature and thought that sounded like a great idea, but I'm not locked into anything, just exploring my options. I'm just looking for something to keep him on grade level or above.

What exactly do you mean by "language arts"? Most children who are just six-ish are learning to read and write (as in penmanship). Those are really the most important things. What else did you have in mind?

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Elizabeth86 wrote:I'm not sure. I was under the impression beginning grammar, reading comprehension. I have no idea honestly.

"Language arts" includes beginning reading instruction, reading/literature, penmanship, grammar, spelling/vocabulary, composition--anything that is language related. It's a term that became fashionable in public schools in the 60s.

When you are teaching your child to read, you are doing "language arts." If you choose a good phonics method, you won't have to worry about comprehension. That became a thing in the 50s, when sight reading became popular. Sight reading was a dismal failure; it requires children to do a lot of guessing based on context and the first and last letter of the word the children are trying to figure out. Often the words they guessed made no sense, and so the whole thing they were reading made no sense. And so teachers had to do extra stuff to know whether or not the children were actually comprehending what they were reading, and try to give them more skills to try to understand what they were reading.

Phonics gives children the tools to decode the words they are reading. There's no guessing. And so there's no need to work on comprehension.

When children are reading more fluently, say, when they're around 9 or 10, then you can things such as teaching them that there are different kinds of things to read (i.e., fiction and nonfiction), how to look for literary themes, and so on. That's actually called "reading," and in higher levels, "literature."

Young children don't need to know grammar. Once they are reading well, and learning to put words together in sentences, and then in tidy little groups called paragraphs, they can do grammar. There are only eight parts of speech plus some thingummies like gerunds; how many years do children need to study that? There are, of course, people who do grammar with children from the very beginning, and so that's something you'll have to figure out. I waited until my dc were 10 or 11, and then we did a good year of grammar.

So the short story is this: Work on teaching your child to read well, and to have good penmanship, and to begin to understand that we put words together in sentences which must begin with a capital letter and end with some kind of punctuation.